BOSTON—The cities of Boston and Los Angeles have one thing more in common than flirting with the idea of being the host city for the 2024 Olympic Games. They both are the venues for one of the more coveted awards in the commercial real estate arena—CoreNet Global's Global Innovators Awards.

The City of Boston and specifically Harvard University recently welcomed finalists from around the world who showcased a panel of expert judges why their projects represent a leap forward in innovation in corporate real estate. The contestants who participated at the CoreNet summit at Harvard University on July 29-30 will now have to wait until when The Global Innovators Award will be presented at the organization's Global Summit North America in Los Angeles on Oct. 18-20. A total of more than 2,500 commercial real estate professionals from around the globe are expected to attend the event.

“The Global Innovators Award nominees represent the cutting edge in corporate real estate and they demonstrate how initiatives that have their roots in real estate have the potential to transform companies. Innovations in corporate real estate presented during our program include those that pertain to technology, design, workplace, and sustainability, among many others,” says Fabricio Lopez, vice president of marketing and communications for Atlanta-based CoreNet Global. "The cases presented characterize innovation and dramatic thought leadership for our profession. We look forward to seeing the top recognition awarded during our Global Summit in Los Angeles later this year."

The presentations at Harvard were made by the finalists in CoreNet Global's 2015 Awards for Industry Excellence. While some of the finalists were recognized with prior CoreNet Global awards, all are now competing to win the ultimate Global Innovators Award, which will be presented at the CoreNet Global Summit North America on Oct. 20th in Los Angeles.

The nominees are:

Titanic Quarter Limited—Mixed-Use Project to Regenerate Redundant Shipyard Where the Titanic was Built

Winner CoreNet Global's Economic Development Leadership Award

Belfast's Titanic Quarter is one of the world's largest urban-waterfront regeneration projects. Master-planned over 185 acres, the project is a redevelopment of the site where the RMS Titanic was designed and built.

The £340 million, 185-acre project, which was once redundant shipyards, is now home to 1,000 residents, 4,000 workers, 15,000 students and 1 million visiting annually. The area includes a hotel, research facilities, offices, a college and Hollywood-style sound stages.

Plans for Titanic Quarter call for it to be home to 50,000 employees and residents.

mindSHIFT—Case4Space: How Engaging Workplaces Lead to Transformation and Growth

Winner CoreNet Global's Global Excellence Award

Case4Space is a research consortium of many companies large and small in the corporate real estate profession and led by Rex Miller of mindShift Consulting in Dallas. The more than year-long research project has led to a book, “Change Your Space, Change Your Culture: How Engaging Workspaces Lead to Transformation and Growth.”

In laying out the detailed theory of Case4Space, the team presented a basic timetable to innovation:

• Innovation begins with a departure. Regardless of how we feel or what it costs, a changing world demands that we leave the comfort of our current conditions. We can do it kicking and screaming or we can go with confidence and curiosity.

• The other side of innovation will be radically different. It will require new tools, new values, new behaviors and ... new people.

• Culture is the challenge. The old culture that once brought success will hold on and resist attempts at change.

• A new culture will form only if the invisible bonds of the old habits are disrupted and an environment that supports desired new behaviors and values erected.

• Space is the catalyst to disrupt and transform culture.

According to the book, “changing the design of the workplace gets to the heart of all of the issues that make work complicated, distracting, and energy draining. That's why it forces leaders to think about and re-imagine strategy, structure, and process. Changing space brings managers and leaders back in touch with how the work really gets done and back in touch with the people and the hidden culture that embodies the real drivers behind behavior and performance.”

OVG Real Estate—The Edge, the World's Most Sustainable Multitenant Office Building

Winner CoreNet Global's Sustainable Leadership Award

The Edge, a multitenant office building in Amsterdam bills itself as the most sustainable office building in the world. Developer OVG Real Estate claims that the building is completely self-sufficient regarding energy usage.

The iconic design and orientation of The Edge is based on the path of the sun. The glass façade on the north side of the building bathes the workspaces in daylight, while the solar panels that are placed on the southern façade shield the workspaces from the sun. The solar panels that cover the roof provide electricity for the aquifer thermal energy storage that generates all energy required for heating and cooling the building.

Rainwater is collected in two reservoirs underneath the building and re-used to flush the lavatories and to irrigate the rooftop's garden.

The connected lighting system has a range of sensors that register daylight, movement and temperature. The system enables employees to use an application on their smartphone or tablet and regulate the climate and light over their individual workspaces.

JLL—Aix Facilities Management Business Intelligence & Optimization Tool

JLL's technology platform, Aix, is a business intelligence and optimization tool that delivers a new way to measure and improve the financial and operational performance of a company's facilities.

This is completed by aggregating financial and service delivery data to provide a multi-dimensional view into a company's portfolio. Companies now have a technology-enabled view into their own portfolio's performance, site against site, as well as a comparative view into their industry peers.

Aix provides intelligence that allows companies to cut costs, improve efficiencies, and optimize service levels, while enabling corporate real estate directors to have data driven conversations regarding the impact of facility performance on the business operations.

Aix allows companies to isolate sites and service categories with the highest spend and/or the lowest levels of service within the portfolio, using normalized data from consistent data sources. Companies have the ability to extract insights and actionable business intelligence, aided by drill-down data functionality across key FM categories.

Woods Bagot—The Village, National Australia Bank, 700 Bourke St., Docklands

National Australia Bank is one of Australia's big four banks. NAB's 700 Bourke St. offices comprise The Village—a first of its kind initiative by a leading bank that provides space and resources for businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Completely free to use, The Village is a welcoming, non-hierarchical co-working space with a strong community within the workspace, online and via events.

NAB saw a unique opportunity to do something unprecedented in Australia—create an environment that fosters relationships between bank, customer and community. By integrating a co-working space into a corporate environment, NAB transformed its mainstream environments into a place where NAB could once again fill an important role within the community.

Complimentary membership is open to all NAB business customers, giving access to facilities and a community of NAB employees, not-for-profits, small business operators, associations and key NAB strategic partners.

Interface—Net-Works Initiative

Net-Works is a program in the Philippines run by Georgia (US)-based company Interface, one of the world's leading manufacturers of carpet tile. Net-Works enables local residents to collect discarded nets, which wreak havoc with the marine ecosystem, and sell them back into a global supply chain—giving those destructive, broken nets a second life as carpet tile.

The project is a partnership of Interface, the Zoological Society of London and Project Seahorse Foundation for Marine Conservation Inc., Philippines. The collected material is reconstituted as 100% recycled yarn by Aquafil, a global supplier of synthetic fibers.

Trammell Crow Company—The Denver Union Station Multimodal Transportation Center

Trammell Crow presented the redevelopment of the historic Union Station in downtown Denver, which included strategically organizing the various modes of transportation throughout the site into LEED-certified facilities (bicycles, taxis, motor vehicles, regional light and commuter rail and Amtrak. The project also facilitated economic development and is home to 400,000 square feet of LEED–certified new office space, as well as retail and more than 200 residential units.

Pittsburgh Regional Alliance—Iron Mountain's National Underground Storage Operations: Butler County, PA

The Pittsburgh Regional Alliance presented Iron Mountain's National Underground Storage facility, which is home to some of America's most valuable assets and vital records for clients such as Walt Disney, Sony Music, Pittsburgh's financial institutions and regional hospitals and various United States government departments.

The facility has several innovative sustainable components including a state of the art geothermal feature.

Iron Mountain partnered with Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center to explore the use of specialized sensing technology in the inspection and persistent monitoring of the roof stability of the underground mine and understanding the characteristics of its geothermal lake in order to increase its cooling capacity.

A combination of sensors and sensing methods could provide valuable predictive information to better manage the facility's space—accurately mapping the space in the pre-development and post-development phases—and providing valuable information about the geothermal lake.

Additionally, this technology will assist in characterizing the surface and subsurface integrity of limestone to fully assess if there are areas of concerns. Finally, Iron Mountain can learn and assess the conditions and stability of the roof in areas of the mine that have not yet been developed and areas for future investment through this technology.